I use a 48 qt rectangular cooler with a stainless steel braid. I've used grain mills at two different LHBS, do single step infusion with batch sparging, but even after half a dozen batches I still seem to get efficiencies in the low 60s. Any thoughts/suggestions?
How fine is your crush? How long are you mashing? How much wort is left in the mash tun's dead space? What's the pH of your mash? What's your water profile look like? What kind of grain bills are you mashing in this water? What's your pre-boil volume?
I use a converted cooler as a mash tun, too, and started out with some fairly low efficiencies. Grinding my own grain helped, as did stirring the mash every 10-15 minutes. That brought it up into the mid-70s, which is fine--I can easily adjust my recipe to hit the intended OG. There's no need to chase after high efficiency as a goal in itself, IMO. (In fact, some believe you get better flavor out of mashes in the lower 70s. But I digress.)
No idea ... it's set at the LHBS. Grains are pretty well cracked, but not powdery. I assume if there were widespread complaints, they'd change it. Given that the owner is a pretty prolific homebrewer, I assume he has it set fairly well. 60 minutes, 15 min batch sparge after first runnings Don't really know, maybe half a gallon. I wish I could get it extracted since it looks pretty sugar-rich. No idea No idea, I use tap water from a small suburb... never found a decent water profile online. In my last recipe, 10# pale malt, 2# torrified wheat. The time before that was a stout with a couple # roast barley/chocolate malt. Both light and dark beers seem to yield similar efficiency. Around 6.5 gal I'm only looking to get around 70-73% ... that's what my recipe calculator defaults for efficiency, so that's how I calculate recipes. I'm forever coming up 10 or so points too low. I just checked my hydrometer with tap water and it read .998. If I add those two points back, I got 1.050 on my batch today, which gives me 62% or so.
Is the 'meal' mostly separated from the husks? If so, the crush is probably good. If not, consider adjusting the gap, or double crush if the owner won't change the gap. Yeah, it's just as sugar-rich as whatever is coming out in your last runnings. Half a gallon is a lot to lose to the dead space. In your case it would translate to about 4% in efficiency. If you're serious about doing all grain, I'd recommend getting it tested. You can send a sample to ward lab www.wardlab.com It's not very expensive. Since you seem to get similar results with very different grain bills, I'll guess the alkalinity is probably not the culprit and is a range that's not causing efficiency problems. But I wonder if it might be calcium deficient, which could cause efficiency problems.
Double batch sparging and using a little CACL in the mash might help as would a smaller mash tun for smaller beers.
On the crush, yes, the husks are definitely cracked enough that the meal is exposed or completely detached. I just checked some of the spent grains that are scattered about my yard On the remnants ... how would I best figure out how much is left? When I'm done, I have a thick bed of grain with uncollected wort in the bottom. If I could get it out, I'd add it to the kettle and boil off a bit longer (or cut back on sparge volume). On the water, I agree with you that it likely isn't pH. Interesting thought on the Ca though. I found this information on water from the same reservoir as mine. The forum avatar of that poster is a picture of a guy drinking from a Trappist Westvleteren chalice (likely a Westy 12) ... gotta guess he's another local homebrewer! pH 7.6Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) Est 151Electrical Conductivity, mmho/cm 0.25Cations / Anions, me/L 2.6 / 2.1 Sodium, Na 20 ppmPotassium, K 2 ppmCalcium, Ca 28 ppmMagnesium, Mg 3 ppmTotal Hardness, CaCO3 83 ppmNitrate, NO3-N 0.8 ppm (SAFE)Sulfate, SO4-S 3 ppmChloride, Cl 6 ppmCarbonate, CO3 < 1 ppmBicarbonate, HCO3 101 ppmTotal Alkalinity, CaCO3 83 ppm Apparently it is pretty low in Ca.
Looks like you have soft water. This is good because it's easy to add things to the water, and harder to take them out. I'll let someone more experienced in water profiles speak further. One other piece of advice I have is to double batch sparge. So, presuming a 5 gal batch, you'll take your first runnings and drain that completely dry. Take another 2.5 gal of boiling water and add that in. Stir 5 minutes. Your grainbed will be about 168-170F. Drain this into your kettle. Add another 2.5 gal of 175F water into the grainbed. Stir 5 min. Drain. Boil as usual. Two important concepts here: 1. Hotter water will remove more sugar, but you don't want to go over 170-172F or you get tannins. 2. Two batches of water helps strip more sugar from the grains because you're adding fresh water halfway through that can hold more sugar.
It's not really a question of how much sugar the water can hold. It can all be dissolved or at least suspended in either case. It's more a question of the sugar density in the wort that's left behind in the grains and the dead space. With a double batch sparge, the same volume of wort is left behind, but it's more diluted, so more of the sugar makes it to the kettle. It's the same reason that (all other things being equal) fly sparging is more efficient than batch sparging, which is more efficient than 'no-sparging.'
What are my options for increasing Ca in my water? What do I need and how much per gallon? I'll try double sparging on my next batch and see if that helps. Thanks!
Double batch sparging helped me a ton as well as super slow lautering/sparging. I also use gypsum in a lot of my beers now which coincides with a big jump in my efficiency.
Just a couple of thoughts that may have been something you've already tried/tested (didn't see these mentioned, but I'm tired so...): a) have you thought about mashing for longer?, and b) have you tested the pH of any of your mashes?, and c) ever tried a starch test? Good luck, I know struggling with efficieny targets blows.
Most folks recommend at least 50 ppm of calcium. There are several free downloadable spreadsheets out there to help with this and other aspects of brewing water chemistry. Bru'nWater is very popular, as is EZWater (which I like). There's also the old spreadsheet by John Palmer, which was great when it was written (based on knowledge at the time), but the newer sheets are better models.
OK, I got the EZWater spreadsheet, which seems pretty cool. I put in the details from the water profile I posted above. Without any adjustments, it calculated a ph of 5.81 for my latest recipe. The Ca, Mg and SO4 values were all way too low. The best additions I could find were to add 3g Gypsum 1g Calcium Chloride 2g Epsom Salt to the mash water and about 10% more to the sparge water (slightly more volume). This put all the minerals in the green range, but the pH was still at 5.76... above the recommended range of 5.4-5.6. Thoughts? EDIT: Looking at the LHBS website, they sell Gypsum, but don't seem to have CaCl or MgSO4. Where can I find these compounds outside an LHBS?
You can find food grade MgSO4=Epsom Salts at the grocery store. Food grade CaCl2 can be ordered online from one of the big stores. You can get lactic or phosphoric from those too. You need to measure the pH, so get some pH papers if nothing else. If your pH is over 5.8 your efficiency goes down rapidly with increasing pH.
Sometimes reasonable mineral additions (the amount of minerals you want for a given profile/style) won't be enough to put your pH into the range you want. That's where Lactic Acid or Acidulated Malt come in (as BigAB hinted at).
Now take all of that stuff and put it into Bru'n water (https://sites.google.com/site/brunwater/). Don't just look at the link, download it and put all of your water information into it. Then use it for every beer you make from now on. If you don't have excel then download libre office (http://www.libreoffice.org/download/), it's free. Your water is high in alkalinity and thus not good for brewing lighter colored beers. So here is your list of things you need: a graduated cylinder (http://morebeer.com/view_product/6540//Graduated_Cylinder_-_10mL) phosphoric acid (you can find this at many homebrew stores) CaSO4 (also know as gypsum) CaCl (also known as calcium chloride) Once you get the hang of using Bru'n water it will become very easy to determine what you need to add to each beer. It remembers your base water so you don't need to enter it every time.
